Your boss calls you in to his office. He feels as if you have started to slack off. He mentioned you show up late, leave early, and don’t volunteer or show initiative.
It’s easy to put all the problems in the workplace with the employees. If people are burning out, your company invests in stress management courses. If people are not creative enough, they decide it’s because employees need to “start having more ideas”. But what if we stopped treating these problems as individual ones and instead changed the structure of our workplaces?
Imagine you just hired someone. You spent 100k on the recruiter, 10k on personality tests, and you got a solid profile of the guy. He was outgoing, creative, empathetic, and well-disciplined. Yet, at the workplace, he seems nothing like he was marketed. He appears introverted and shy. He seems cautious about expressing his ideas, cold toward customers, and struggles to follow the processes. Was it that he lied? Or was it that the personality test failed to predict how he would perform in your specific workplace environment?
I think we can all recognize situations when we feel slightly “out of sorts”. I’ve had jobs where I was unmotivated and felt unsafe and uncomfortable, which made me quiet, shy, and cautious. It wasn’t who I was – just who I was in that particular context. Personality psychologists often ignore context. It’s not strange to understand why. It’s confusing when someone acts differently in one situation than in another. The general explanation is “because they wore a mask” or “were dishonest” somehow. But when a manager says, “all my employees are so unmotivated, so lazy,” the problem is rarely with the employees, and more often with the workplace culture.
We prefer to target our interventions on the individuals, but it’s the culture that needs to change. We often believe it’s impossible to change a culture, but it’s actually very easy. A company can get new management and go from a high-performing workplace to immediate problems. I’ve heard of people who brought in external consultants to transform a company into a more productive one, only to end up leaving the company in shambles. They had killed an authentic business culture with high trust and strong relationships and made it into a workplace where employees felt unsafe, acted dishonestly, and lacked confidence and autonomy.
I think one reason why we prefer individual explanations is that it’s easier to blame an individual than an entire company. We may even think it’s more honest. We usually wrongly read malicious intentions. They’re lazy because they’re disloyal towards the company, you might say. It’s easier to take a cultural difference as a personal disagreement. Ego wants to take things personally, anyway.
Most company-led wellness initiatives fail. They’re shortsighted and misdirected. Structural reforms make the biggest difference. If you want more creativity at work, you often want to discourage management from pushing for too short development curves. If you want to motivate employees, you give them personal autonomy and control over their own work. If you want to encourage flow and productivity, you have to challenge your employees, but not so much that they give up. Just slightly more than what they think they can handle. Not more than that.
Let’s change the conversation from individuals – and personality-related differences – to social – cultural differences, and let’s focus interventions on changing structures – not people.
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